Kerry Should Stop Stiff-Arming the Press

By: John Hanchette Democratic candidate for president John Kerry decided last month to stop unscheduled conversations with reporters on his campaign plane. The decision, which gained wide attention only last week, followed a precipitous drop in the polls that some political analysts blame on just such an informal chat.

Er, um, ahem...three words of advice from an aging professor who once covered half a dozen campaigns for the White House: Not a good idea.

In early August, Kerry was in Grand Canyon National Park on a sunny day talking about domestic policy. President Bush had been challenging Kerry , who voted in the Senate to authorize the war in Iraq, to explain whether he would have displayed the same support had he known that U.S and allied forces would not find weapons of mass destruction.

As recounted by Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post, "Kerry strolled up to reporters, took what two of his own aides privately called obvious political bait and declared without equivocation that , 'yes, I would have voted for the authority' for Bush to wage the conflict."

With that, added VandeHei, the Massachusetts senator "provided the Bush campaign the political ammunition it sought" to blur differences between the two over the explosive Iraq war issue. Kerry has sagged badly in the polls since, particularly those that ask who could do a better job handling that controversial conflict.

Kerry apparently attributes some of this to engaging in the conversational scrums for which campaign reporters so lust. These journalistic elbowing contests:

* Often result in true news or at least an alternative lead to the day's coverage.

* Give the reporters a candid and unstructured look at the person who could be the next president.

* Sometimes catch the candidate in a relaxed mood in which questions may actually get answered.

Bill Clinton was probably the best at this, in my experience, strolling to the back of the plane at apparent whim and engaging reporters in conversation ranging from favorite reading material to sports, which he didn't seem to know much about. Pretty soon, he'd be making news with observations on opponents or national issues. Or he'd invite reporters up front to play hearts, his card game of choice.

Sometimes, after filing their stories, reporters would find him waiting at the steps of the campaign plane to make small talk and a couple of comments before re-boarding.

Clinton obviously had lots of opportunity to get cheesed off about unfavorable press coverage, justified or not, but he rarely succumbed to the temptation, even in his rookie year, when his wife got hit.

One morning in the important 1992 Illinois primary, Hillary Clinton, shaking hands in Chicago's Busy Bee Coffee Shop, answered a question about reconciling a career and a family life. She remarked sharply, "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession."

Bill Clinton, in his recent autobiography recalls, "The press picked up the 'tea and cookies' remark and played it as a slam on stay-at-home mothers. The Republican culture warriors had a field day, portraying Hillary as a militant feminist lawyer."

Right after episode, back in '92, he was pretty grumpy about it, but he kept right on talking to reporters with spontaneity, and won the Illinois contest with 52 percent of the vote, thumping Jerry Brown and the late Paul Tsongas.

Ronald Reagan didn't much care for the crush of reporters in informal mixers, but he'd let longtime political adviser and press secretary Lyn Nofziger schedule one-on-one personal interviews on the plane as long as a general topic idea was discussed beforehand. Sometimes he'd turn down a request for more than one question, but he'd let the reporter hang around to watch him converse with aides and read documents. (He usually pointed out the fresh rose Nancy Reagan always had on his desk each morning, even on the campaign plane.)

The problem with shutting off reportorial access to so-called "spontaneous" moments of give and take is that it indicates to veteran journalists a loss of confidence on the part of the candidate, be he incumbent or challenger. It portends a possible smell of death in the campaign, a bow to the political grim reaper. At least reporters often interpret it that way.

When President Jimmy Carter, trailing Reagan badly, impetuously scheduled one last frenetic and futile flight to the Northwest the day before the 1980 election, he stuck to scheduled events, creating no late buzz. Reporters lost attention, concentrating instead on buying fresh salmon and stuffing it in the overhead luggage racks in brown wrapping paper. The return flight to Washington is not a pleasant aromatic memory.

In 1992, Bush the Elder, in the closing days of the campaign, inexplicably to some, conducted a pleasant but meandering train ride through Georgia and the Carolinas while bigger vital swing states went unattended. When he stayed up front and sent the ancient Strom Thurmond back to engage the press about his own 1948 presidential candidacy on a states' rights ticket, some reporters wrote that the incumbent Bush was a "flatliner" (after a popular movie of the day indicating no heartbeat in the main character).

Kerry finally broke his silence a few days ago, talking with a Time magazine reporter on the record, but will this be the exception or the rule? Stiff-arming the working press might have some advantages for a presidential candidate, but certainly not for John Kerry, about whom the American voters want to know much, much more.